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One of the most ANNOYING, and SELF-DESTRUCTIVE, issues facing teleworkers is the problem of communicating and/or publishing a text which has spelling, punctuation, and/or grammatical errors. It is an inconvenience for the consumer of your text, and for those of us who publish any sort of professional (or even semi-professional) content, it can cause a SIGNIFICANT reduction in perceived integrity in those who consume our content. Just that ONE small spelling or grammatical error which SLIPS past our rough proofread can interrupt the flow of our writing, and in more serious cases, turn people off to the message we are trying to convey. Let's face it, NO ONE likes to be in the process of enjoying reading a post, and then suddenly find that whole enjoyable process abruptly interrupted by some annoying typo, or other error, which just creates that "icky" feeling which is TOTALLY avoidable if the writer had just taken a few minutes to use a proper tool to polish their final draft.

One such tool is Grammarly. They have a free account, which has enough valuable features for most people reading this post, and they also have a paid (premium) version, which is a bit pricey, but the extra features are quite valuable if you need them, and can justify the cost as a business expense. After all, most of us who are SERIOUS here on Steemit ARE making income from our writing, after all. The choice if yours, of course.

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Most Valuable Features

Browser Plug-in

The Grammarly browser plug-in is EXTREMELY useful. The plug-in integrates the functions of the program into essentially ALL of the websites we commonly use (Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, etc. -- and YES, Steemit as well). Once you post any amount of text into a text field the plug-in processes the text and displays all of its various correction features. These include checks for : spelling, punctuation, grammar, and even style. You can turn each of these options on and off as you deem appropriate for your specific text.

Personal Dictionary

For people who do any sort of more STYLISTIC writing (such as creative writing (fiction, poetry), transcription, etc.), where you often use unconventional words which are not found in standard dictionaries, Grammarly provides a way for you to add new, unique words as an EXEMPTION, using the "personal dictionary" function. With one click you can add these words to your personalized dictionary so that they will not show up as "unknown/error" words by the program in the future.

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Valuable Premium Features

Although you can easily get by with the basic features of the free version of this program, some may find a few of the premium features to be valuable, especially due to the specific issues we deal with on Steemit.

Plagiarism detector

For Steemit content creators this is a very valuable feature, as we all know how much of a problem plagiarism is on the Steemit platform. This tool helps you minimize UNINTENTIONAL plagiarism - the kind which the various plagiarism bots are designed to detect in Steemit posts. This feature basically uses cloud computing to scan through MILLIONS of websites in search of any substantial chunks of text which match yours. In this way you will at least know if you are unintentionally committing plagiarism. If it finds an instance of plagiarism which you then deem to be substantial, it then assists you by providing examples of proper citation format to include in your posts if you choose to publish the material. Since plagiarism on Steemit MAY result in decrease in earnings on posts you may decide that this is a valuable enough feature to pay for.

Style Proofreading Filters

You can apply style templates which have specific pre-adjusted settings most appropriate to the style of writing of your document. These include : academic, business, general, technical, casual, and creative. Each of these style settings has a different level of strictness of the proofreading parameters mentioned earlier.

I think that the features mentioned above are the most relevant for Steemit content producers. You can find out more specific information in the detailed support section on their site. I believe that the above features are EXTREMELY valuable to ANY teleworker, and specifically to those of us who create content on Steemit, and I HIGHLY recommend that you AT LEAST experiment with the free version of this program. In fact, I used to it through the WHOLE process of writing this post. The program is a good investment in your personal and professional development, as it increases the real-time awareness of your writing process, which helps you improve your skills.

If I can turn on JUST ONE new Steemian to this excellent gem of a program I will consider this post a success. Feel free to share your experience using this program, and/or suggest ADDITIONAL valuable programs you have used, related to this one, in your regular telework routine.

Good luck,

@transcript-junky

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